Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for navigating data contents and more particularly to a search-based navigation of data across different contexts.
Software applications have come to rely heavily on a paradigm for navigating the data and functions of that application that is largely based on a set of menus. For example, enterprise applications provide a menu-based approach to help users navigate to their transaction. Depending on the user's role, the user has to go through a series of clicks using folders and sub-folders available to him to get to the transaction's search page. A search initiated at that point will return possible results for the user to review and drill down to its detail.
However, this approach takes away users productivity by demanding series of clicks just to get to the transaction and requiring user to know his way through the menu structure. Often users in an enterprise application need to take several actions as part of their daily business tasks. These actions are related and potentially tied to a base transaction. Each such action requires user to go to the base transaction and then navigate to the transaction tied to that related action linked from there, i.e., it's a multi-hop process to get to the related action transaction for the user just to get to the page they are interested in. One of the other issues users have to deal with it is ability to work with search and search results. When a user drills down to a transaction from search results page, he may have the need to initiate a new search against the same business component which requires him to go back to search page by leaving his current context which is undesirable from a user experience perspective. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for navigating data contents.